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CHAPTER 3

Bit by Bit: Civil Rights and the Eisenhower Administration

Though many African Americans supported Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 in hopes that the GOP would surpass the Democratic Party on issues of civil rights, the president proved to be a lukewarm ally. He had had few interactions with African Americans in his life before the presidency. Born in Jim Crow Texas and spending nearly all his adult life in a segregated army, he was insulated from racial discrimination and black protests. He was not a white supremacist by any means, but civil rights was not an issue he spent time thinking, or talking, about unless pressed to do so. More pragmatic than ideological, Eisenhower’s self-touted brand of “Modern Republicanism” emphasized moderation and stability over rigid dogma and radical change. As such, he balked at conservative calls to overturn the New Deal, but was also skeptical of idealistic liberals who sought to upend the South’s deeply entrenched racial order. By his second term, he found it increasingly difficult to strike a moderate balance on civil rights that would placate both black and white southerners. Together, these two groups had played an important role in his 1956 victories in Texas, Louisiana, and the border South, with African Americans seeing him as a potential alternative to Democrats and whites valuing his military service and down-to-earth persona. Without decisive leadership from the White House, the Republican Party of the 1950s lacked ideological and strategic moorings, sharing the president’s hope that they could both retain black gains and expand deeper into the Democratic South.

This balancing act became even harder to maneuver by the late 1950s, as grassroots protests like the Montgomery bus boycott mobilized African Americans across the South and launched a new phase of the civil rights movement. If Eisenhower didn’t want to rock the boat on race relations, the undercurrents of black discontent that had risen to the surface would rock it for him. As E. Frederic Morrow noted, “American Blacks were set to love President Eisenhower. But when he failed to come to grips with their hopes and aspirations, the Black community soured and the expressions of protest became physical rather than just verbal.” As black dissatisfaction morphed into nonviolent demonstrations, and white backlash against activists intensified, Eisenhower’s second term would be marred by his cautious approach that confused and offended both blacks and segregationists. Moderate support for civil rights might have been acceptable, even progressive, in the early 1950s when Eisenhower first entered the political arena, but by the end of the decade African Americans were no longer content with gradual reform. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had cast his ballot for Eisenhower in 1956, reflected the frustrations of many African Americans by the late 1950s, describing the president’s remedy for cancerous Jim Crow as “bit by bit with a tweezer because the surgeon’s knife was an instrument too radical.”¹

Eisenhower was willing, however, to combat egregious forms of black disenfranchisement. Despite a steady rise in black voter registration in the region since the 1940s, only 25 percent of voting-age African Americans in eleven southern states voted in 1956. In Mississippi, where blacks composed over 40 percent of the state’s adult population, they made up less than 4 percent of registered voters. African Americans represented one-third of Alabama’s population, but only 8 percent of the state’s voters. Approximately 75 percent of Georgia’s voting-age African Americans were not registered. Sixteen counties in the Deep South with majority black populations had zero registered black voters, and just 5 percent of African Americans were registered in forty-nine additional black belt counties. These registration numbers were a byproduct of over sixty years of violence and intimidation. For those who risked their lives and attempted to register, local officials disenfranchised them through a legal maze of poll taxes and restrictions, including literacy tests that featured intentionally impossible questions, such as “How many bubbles are there in a cake of soap?”²

Central to Eisenhower’s focus on eliminating voter discrimination was his belief that if black voters could be protected, they would end Jim Crow themselves at the ballot box. This would allow for state-level repeals of segregation rather than sweeping federal decrees. By targeting the most obviously unconstitutional denial of black citizenship rights, it also let him off the hook when it came to dealing directly with the social and cultural forms of discrimination that permeated the South. In January 1957, Eisenhower reintroduced voter-protection legislation similar to the failed bill from the previous year. Again written by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, the law made it a federal crime to interfere with voters in federal elections, created a new assistant attorney general to handle civil rights violations, and gave federal judges the power to issue injunctions to protect the right to vote and declare in contempt anyone who interfered. By placing this power in the hands of judges, Brownell intended to remove the matter from criminal trials, where he was well aware that southern juries would side with local officials.³

While the administration’s bill made it through the House without any substantial changes, the Senate, where southern Democrats chaired five of the eight most powerful committees, was a much more hostile environment. Even northern Democrats, including John F. Kennedy (Massachusetts) and Warren Magnuson (Washington), voted to send the 1957 bill to James Eastland’s Judiciary Committee, where its most effective sections were diluted. Opposition to the legislation initially focused on Title III, which provided civil and criminal penalties for anyone who violated another’s rights, including, but not limited to, voting rights, and gave the president the authority to use troops to enforce civil rights laws. Led by Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, who claimed that it would create “new and drastic procedures to cover a wide variety of vaguely defined so-called civil rights,” the Senate rejected the provisions. Despite protests from Jacob Javits, William Knowland, and other Senate Republicans, Eisenhower agreed to a compromise that excluded the controversial section.⁴

The president was less conciliatory on the issue of jury trials. On August 1, the Senate passed a jury trial amendment that placed the power to prosecute a person held in contempt of a federal judge’s orders in the hands of southern juries. Twelve conservative Republicans joined thirty-nine Democrats in supporting the amendment, which significantly weakened the federal government’s ability to enforce the law, as southern juries were notorious for acquitting those accused of civil rights violations. Even Mississippi’s segregationist governor described the new bill as a “fairly harmless proposition.” Among those who voted for the amendment were emerging conservative Republican icon Barry Goldwater (Arizona) and liberal Democrats Paul Douglas (Illinois) and Hubert Humphrey (Minnesota). Vice President Richard Nixon, one of the amendment’s most vocal critics, described its passage as “a vote against the right to vote.” Senate minority leader William Knowland called it “a vote to kill … an effective voting rights bill,” and was later found crying in his office by the NAACP’s Clarence Mitchell. At a cabinet meeting the following day, Eisenhower described the amendment as “one of the most serious political defeats of the past four years,” and issued a statement lamenting that millions of black voters “will continue … to be disenfranchised.”⁵

It remained initially unclear whether Eisenhower would sign or veto the compromised law. The NAACP took a “calculated risk” and endorsed the bill, telling members, “even though it has been weakened by the Senate … [it] will constitute a start toward our goal, and a start is better than standing still.” They were joined by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and union leader Joseph Rauh, who argued that to a starving man “a half-loaf of bread was better than no bread at all.” King followed suit, telling Vice President Nixon, who supported a veto, that “while I sympathize with your point of view, I feel that civil rights legislation is urgent now, and the present bill will go a long way to insure it.” Other black luminaries, including Ralph Bunche, baseball legend Jackie Robinson, John Sengstacke of the Chicago Defender, and Earl Dickerson of the NAACP board of directors, were less willing to compromise, echoing A. Philip Randolph in declaring that a weak bill was “worse than no bill at all.”⁶

Leading black Republicans supported a veto. Val Washington argued, “it is better to have no bill at all than to have one with no teeth in it.” The Grand Exalted Ruler of the black Elks, Robert H. Johnson, declared that his organization opposed the weakened bill, and Elk official Larry Foster wrote Eisenhower, “your veto of the bill … will be welcomed by all those who hate deception and love justice. The bill as it now stands is a farce.” Though the impetus for the legislation came from Eisenhower’s Justice Department, its compromised form belonged to Lyndon Johnson, who rallied his party behind a tame bill acceptable to all but its most rabid segregationists. Northern Democrats could tell black constituents they passed a civil rights bill, while southern Democrats could return home to highlight their role in rendering the same bill ineffective. Though the NAACP’s national leadership and union leaders would have preferred a stronger bill, their strong ties to northern Democrats provided incentive to accept concessions, as a presidential veto would draw attention to the role of high-profile Democrats in scrapping its strongest sections. Many black Republicans, such as Julius Adams of the New York Amsterdam News, believed the NAACP had sold out to protect Democrats. E. Frederic Morrow publicly expressed his “shock” that the organization used “the long-ago discarded ‘half-a-loaf’ theory” to support the legislation, “no matter how emasculating or insulting.” Their willingness to compromise provided shelter for Democrats to “run for cover,” he noted, and, “it is strange to see the NAACP agreeing with men of the South like Eastland, Lyndon Johnson and Senator Russell of Georgia on the same bill.”⁷

Guaranteed by Lyndon Johnson that a bill without a jury trial amendment would never get through the Senate, Eisenhower agreed to support a compromise bill. He feared that his opponents would never stop reminding black voters that a Republican president vetoed the first civil rights legislation in over eighty years, but understood that supporting the bill would be seen by many in his own party as caving in to Johnson and the Democrats. With Eisenhower promising his support, the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 on August 29 by a vote of 60–15. All 15 votes against it were cast by southern Democrats.⁸

While the law did not endear Eisenhower to African Americans, it enhanced the vice president’s image as the administration’s most prominent supporter of civil rights. According to a September edition of the Reporter magazine, the bill “turned Vice-President Richard Nixon … into an avowed champion in this field.” The day after the bill was passed, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote Nixon to say “how grateful all people of goodwill are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality…. This is certainly an expression of your devotion to the highest mandates of the moral law.” NAACP lawyer James Nabrit, Jr., sent the vice president a telegram, asserting, “The Negro people will not forget your great contribution toward the passage of the Civil Rights Bill.” Jackie Robinson, who would become a confidant of the vice president by 1960, promised “we will not forget those of you with enough courage to stand by your conviction,” and would “never forget the fight you made and what you stand for.”⁹

Though supporters of civil rights could be found inside Eisenhower’s administration, including Nixon, E. Frederic Morrow, Maxwell Rabb, and Sherman Adams, it also housed conservatives who were far less willing to endorse even moderate advances. At cabinet meetings, secretaries John Foster Dulles, Charles Wilson, and Marion Folsom called Brownell’s civil rights bills “impractical,” and warned they would “aggravate the situation” in the South. secretary of health, education and welfare (HEW) Oveta Culp Hobby, wife of a former Democratic governor of Texas, fired Jane Morrow Spaulding, a black HEW appointee, after Spaulding publicly targeted southern hospitals that refused to hire black doctors. Behind the scenes, Eisenhower’s conservative chief of staff during his second term, Wilton Persons, told Morrow, “I would appreciate it if you never approach me or come to me with anything involving civil rights,” and advised him to “discuss any matters in this area with somebody else.” The conversation confirmed Morrow’s fears that “the South looks hopefully” to Persons “to exercise restraining influences on the President in matters of race.”¹⁰

While his hands-off leadership gave liberal cabinet members like Brownell room to pursue a civil rights agenda, Eisenhower himself typically avoided the issue altogether. Simeon Booker of Jet stopped attending presidential press conferences, because Eisenhower refused to recognize black reporters and said little on issues of race. Journalist Alice Dunnigan similarly recalled that the president “was not familiar with many questions raised on civil rights … he would become very annoyed whenever such questions were raised.” Morrow wrote in his diary that while Eisenhower may have “noble instincts about things that are right and just … [his] closest personal friends are Southerners,” and he had a difficult time “in formulating an opinion or a policy” on issues of racial equality. Nor did he care for the direct action protests and tactics of the civil rights movement, once telling Morrow that “progress does not necessarily demand noisy conflict.” The president’s desire to place domestic issues like civil rights in the hands of cabinet members left matters of equality at the mercy of department secretaries. While a cabinet member like Brownell could actively pursue a progressive agenda, others could placate the South. Without a clear, strong voice from inside the Oval Office, administration policy was disjointed and confused, giving only glimpses of hope to African Americans looking for national leadership.¹¹

Morrow observed that “civil rights in the Eisenhower Administration was handled like a bad dream, or like something that’s not very nice, and you shield yourself from it as long as you possibly can.” Many civil rights leaders echoed this sentiment. Fred Shuttlesworth declared African Americans had “no friend in Ike,” who “saw nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing, and he did nothing until he had to.” Martin Luther King, Jr., claimed that while Eisenhower was “a man of genuine integrity and good will … I don’t think he feels like being a crusader for integration.” The president instead favored gradual change, where “you just wait 50 or 100 years and it will work itself out.” Roy Wilkins bemoaned that while Eisenhower “made inroads into the Negro vote,” his administration “demonstrated their ineptitude in expanding their gains … acting as though they were ashamed to be forthright on the issues.”¹²

As the administration’s highest profile African American, Morrow implored the president to take a stronger stand against southern violence. Following the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in August 1955, he suggested that the administration “issue some kind of statement deploring the breakdown of law and order in Mississippi, and stating that it is un-American and undemocratic and contrary to the American way.” To his dismay, he found that “there seems to be complete fright when it is suggested that such action be taken,” and warned, “it is things like the refusal of the Republicans to issue any kind of fear-allaying statement on conditions in Mississippi that contributes to the Negro’s thinking that the Republican Party deserts him in crisis.” Morrow, Val Washington, James Nabrit, J. Ernest Wilkins, and Maxwell Rabb concluded after a strategy meeting that “the Republicans missed the ball when no prominent member of the administration spoke out against the Till matter.” Rabb, a white advisor who had the closest ear of the group to the president, claimed to have a difficult time getting anyone “close to the President to go along with this kind of thing on the matter of civil rights.” Morrow could only conclude “there seems to be some uncanny fear that to alienate the South on this matter of race will be disastrous.” Even Sherman Adams, Morrow’s closest ally inside the White House, opposed issuing a statement condemning southern violence, claiming, “Eisenhower is the President of all the country and could not make speeches designed to influence or castigate any segment of the American public.”¹³

African Americans from across the country joined Morrow in urging the president to speak out against racial violence. Morrow described daily “sacks of mail” brought to his office “berating the president for his failure to denounce the breakdown of law and order.” The editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, William Nunn, warned party officials that his paper was “swamped” with letters from readers who “feel that a miscarriage of justice such as this should call for some official statement from the Justice Department.” Roy Wilkins told Val Washington that if the administration had simply “made a move and been rebuffed it could have collected some kudos for effort…. But it said and did nothing.” Realistically, a presidential statement would have had a minimal effect on curbing southern violence, but symbolically to African Americans Eisenhower’s silence proved his apathy to their suffering.¹⁴

The Eisenhower administration’s muted response occurred during a decade of sustained terrorism against southern blacks. The Ku Klux Klan grew exponentially in the 1950s, having significantly more members and committing more acts of violence than it had in decades. On Christmas night 1951, activist Harry T. Moore and his wife were killed after a bomb exploded outside his Florida home. In 1955, two of Mississippi’s leading civil rights workers, Rev. George W. Lee and Lamar Smith, were murdered for encouraging blacks to register to vote. Lee, no relation to George W. Lee of Memphis, was the first African American since Reconstruction to register to vote in Belzoni, Mississippi. During the Montgomery bus boycott, Klansmen bombed the homes and businesses of activists, and murdered a black truck driver who they believed had a white girlfriend. In 1956, Fred Shuttlesworth was nearly killed in Birmingham after sixteen sticks of dynamite were set off underneath his bedroom.¹⁵

Figure 5. President Eisenhower meets with E. Frederic Morrow in the White House, October 4, 1956. National Park Service photo, 72-1908, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.

A distraught E. Frederic Morrow wrote in his diary that though “the bombings and the racial strife in the country continues…. There does not seem to be leadership forthcoming from anywhere.” When juxtaposed to the presidential proclamations against Soviet tyranny in Eastern Europe, he observed, “Hungarians seem to be getting a better break in their efforts to find freedom” than black citizens of America. Roy Wilkins believed that “the ‘soft’ and ‘slow’ policy of the President” bore “some blame for the tensions and ugliness now breaking out all over,” and Martin Luther King, Jr., feared that Eisenhower’s inability “to render positive leadership in this area … will serve to push the moderates more and more in the background.” Soon after King became head of the newly created Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization joined with Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and other civil rights leaders in announcing a large-scale demonstration in Washington, D.C. A primary intent of the 1957 “Prayer Pilgrimage,” scheduled on the third anniversary of Brown, was to condemn Eisenhower’s silence on racial violence. Speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King denounced the president as “all too silent and apathetic.”¹⁶

Much to the chagrin of black Republicans, on the few occasions when Eisenhower mentioned civil rights, he emphasized gradualism. In a letter to Roy Wilkins, he repeated his standard response when addressing the issue, arguing that “laws on the statute book are not enough … patience and forbearance and wisdom are required of all of us if we are to solve effectively the perplexing problems of this trying period of adjustment.” Such language was seen as antiquated not only by civil rights leaders, but by black Republicans as well. Throughout his time in the White House, E. Frederic Morrow constantly reminded members of the administration that most blacks “are against any talk of moderation and the use of the term ‘gradualism’ is fatal when addressing any Negro audience.” George W. Lee of Memphis told Young Republicans in Atlanta, “we would have been in a devil of a fix if gradualism had been employed” during Reconstruction, when Republicans used “rapid right now action” to push through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Jackie Robinson, who would become the best-known black Republican of the 1960s, asked the president, to “whom you are referring when you say we must be patient,” reminding him that African Americans “have patiently waited all these years for the rights supposedly guaranteed us under our Constitution.”¹⁷

After “much sparring behind the scenes” and “several conferences” with Sherman Adams, Morrow convinced the president to speak before the Negro Publishers Association’s annual meeting in May 1958. Recognizing Eisenhower’s unpopular rhetoric, Morrow prepared a “fact sheet” on the terms and phrases to avoid when speaking to black audiences. During the limousine ride with the president to the event, he again emphasized black discomfort with Eisenhower’s standard responses. After receiving loud cheers from a crowd of nearly four hundred leading black newspaper publishers, editors, and journalists, many of whom were sympathetic to the GOP, Eisenhower began his speech by describing a variety of domestic and international issues confronting the nation. As he transitioned to the topic of civil rights, he set aside his prepared remarks to speak extemporaneously, and told the audience that “you people” need to have “patience and forbearance,” as “there are no revolutionary cures” to combat discrimination. Upon hearing the president repeat this string of objectionable phrases, Morrow observed, “the audience reacted as if a time bomb had exploded. Their contorted and pained faces expressed their disbelief and disdain. Sitting on the platform next to the President, I could feel life draining from me.”¹⁸

The reaction of black Republicans to the speech was overwhelmingly negative. The chairman of the meeting, William O. Walker, whose Cleveland Call and Post had consistently been one of the most loyal Republican newspapers in the country, declined to accompany Eisenhower out of the room, complaining that this was “the kind of advice we have been getting” since the Brown decision. The Iowa Bystander, another solidly Republican paper, editorialized that the president had pulled “the rug from under law abiding citizens … and has encouraged the rabble to push harder against the very thing he is pledged to uphold—law and order.” Jackie Robinson, who was in attendance, wrote Eisenhower that he “felt like standing up and saying ‘Oh no! Not again,’” and reminded him that “we have been the most patient of all people.” The president’s words, “unwittingly crush the spirit of freedom in Negroes by constantly urging forbearance and give hope to those … who would take from us even those freedoms we now enjoy.”¹⁹

The fall 1957 desegregation crisis at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, further exposed the inadequacies of Eisenhower’s gradualist approach to race relations. As his former speechwriter, Emmet John Hughes, later wrote, Eisenhower’s “limp direction” in the field of civil rights “served almost as a pathetic and inviting prologue to Little Rock.” Prior to the crisis, the president’s rhetoric regarding school desegregation suggested to many southern whites that there was little he would do to actively enforce desegregation. In April 1956, he remarked, “civil rights extremists never stop to consider that although you can send in troops, troops can’t make anyone operate schools,” and as late as July 1957 claimed, “I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send federal troops … to enforce the orders of a federal court.” As Little Rock officials prepared to implement the court-ordered desegregation of Central High in September, Governor Orval Faubus ordered the state National Guard to block the nine enrolled black students from entering the school. Seeking a quiet solution, Eisenhower publicly stated, “you cannot change people’s hearts merely by laws,” and expressed his hope that the people of Little Rock would peacefully comply with the court order. He invited Faubus to join him in Newport, Rhode Island, and convinced the governor to call off the National Guard. Many of Little Rock’s white citizens, however, were not prepared to have their children attend an integrated school, and the black students faced a rabid mob as they approached Central High. Police and law enforcement personnel tepidly intervened only after the confrontation descended into violent chaos.²⁰

As photographs of defenseless black children accosted by angry crowds circulated throughout the country, African Americans blamed Eisenhower for not denouncing violence and enforcing the court order. Roy Wilkins claimed that the president “has been absolutely and thoroughly disappointing and disillusioning” in his handling of the crisis. Helen Edmonds, who had endorsed Eisenhower at the national convention just one year earlier, reported to Val Washington that even African Americans who “formerly manifested a love for the President, are saying that they are no longer enchanted and that the seeming indecision on the Arkansas situation was the breaking point.” The crisis galvanized the nation, and threatened America’s self-portrayal as an international beacon of freedom, giving the president little choice but to act. On September 24, weeks after the crisis began, Eisenhower finally addressed the nation in a televised speech. Surrounded by portraits that strategically included both Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, the president sympathized with white southerners, but claimed that even if the Supreme Court was wrong in Brown, “Our personal opinions about the decision have no bearing on the matter of enforcement; the responsibility and authority of the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution are very clear.” He then federalized Arkansas’s National Guard and sent a thousand troops from the 101st Airborne Division to supervise the desegregation of Central High. Though some whites harassed the black students throughout the rest of the school year, the continued presence of armed soldiers, the first federal troops dispatched to the South since Reconstruction, were a visible sign of Eisenhower’s reluctant action to preserve the credibility of the federal judiciary. Little Rock would hardly become an integration success story, however, as Governor Faubus closed all four of Little Rock’s high schools for the 1958–1959 school year.²¹

Little Rock illustrated the Republican electoral quandary. On the one hand, Republicans saw significant gains among African Americans in Eisenhower’s reelection effort. On the other hand, with his decisive southern wins in 1952 and 1956, the GOP believed they could form a new and potentially permanent coalition of businessmen, fiscal conservatives, and middle-class suburbanites in the South. Early in 1957, Meade Alcorn, a former state legislator from Connecticut and recently named chairman of the Republican National Committee, created a Southern Division, often called “Operation Dixie,” to expand the party in the South. The division’s director, I. Lee Potter, a real estate investor and state chairman of the Virginia Republican Party, embodied the attitude of young southern Republicans. Though he could be described as a moderate by southern standards, believing the rabid racism of Democrats damaged southern economic progress, he publicly declared “our party is for segregation” soon after taking charge of Operation Dixie. Revealing Republican priorities, Potter received the third highest budget of any special division of the national committee, behind only Young Republicans and the Women’s Division. His initial six-month budget was $20,000, which doubled by 1960.²²